A recent study reported that people who like a company sometimes write reviews on products the person has never bought, owned or used. You think they’re writing favorable reviews in order to promote the product, right?

Making Up Stories About Jesus

That cheesy poem is firmly entrenched in bad doctrine because if that “Footprints” poem says anything it says God helps those who help themselves. You walk for as far as you can on your own, and when you can’t take another step, then Jesus will carry you. Yeah, like that’s in the Bible. Check the Book of Hesitations.

I’d rather read the alternative story: “Dragprints.” That one describes a set of footprints going down the length of the beach with two drag marks alongside. Instead of picking you up and carrying you when you got tired, Jesus tells you he had to drag you along through life.

It is no more biblical, but it is a lot funnier.

I think most people who make up these types of stories do it because they haven’t read the truth about Jesus, at least not carefully. The Bible contains all we need to know about Jesus in order to understand him and our need for him.

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30-31.)

I’ll summarize that: The Bible doesn’t tell us everything about Jesus, but it tells us what we need to know about him.

I wonder if this poem actually WAS inspired by a dream in which Jesus said these words to the person. There is nothing wrong with recounting dreams in a piece of poetry, but the way this poem has almost become equivalent to Scripture is really strange and unfortunate, because it represents God as so much less than he really is.

There’s a LOT of “67th Books of the Bible” out there. From Late Great Planet Earth to Atlas Shrugged to Calvin’s Institutes. And they all seem ot have a talent for taking over and displacing the other 66.

Yeah…I love poetry, prose, allegory and other well used literary devices…I really do. And any one of these can help drive home a specific truth about God…help us better understand an aspect of His nature. BUT…when the literary device starts being treated as the gospel truth…we lose all basis for our belief.

(Note: “Book of Hezekaiah” is a fictional book of the Bible I first heard about at Newman Center in the early Eighties. If you were among Chapter-and-Verse types and didn’t remember where a passage in the Bible came from, you placed it in the Book of Hezekaiah.)